The NSA & CITIZENFOUR: 2014’s Tom & Jerry

CITIZENFOUR is Edward Snowden. The NSA & Snowden are respectively like Tom and Jerry. Do you remember who won?

The Bad:
When you use the Caps Lock key we know to listen to you attentively. This is because of the time-tested axiom that shouting wins all arguments at all times and in all places. Like the all-caps of the title, anti-authoritarian Pulitzer Prize winning director Laura Poitras’ documentary CITIZENFOUR has a whiff of blemishes. There are a dab of scenes of the NSA’s coercively sustained lands shot at night with the most dire-sounding background music this side of the Mississippi River. She has artistic liberty to shoot the film how she wants to, and no one can tell a story absent of biases, but I think day-time shots and revelations about the NSA are equally if not more chilling to an audience than dramatic night shots backed by dramatic music.

The Good:
I feel almost silly in telling you that this is a film you should watch if you are against unaccountable and power hungry elitists who want to learn every facet of your life down to the length of your eyelashes and the velocity at which your fecal matter hits the water of your toilet. Almost. Go watch it. Whilst Laura Poitras may or may not be a ‘pure’ libertarian in the eyes of the liberty movement’s thought police, she clearly and proudly displays her inveterate antipathy to the coercively monopolized system of court, security and road production that we fondly refer to as the State. Poitras is positively radical. She hates the State.

I don’t know if the majority of the people in the United States of America will ever want to see the withering away of the State. I believe in the ability of most people to think critically if given enough attention and evidence. Poitras’ film has evidence after evidence after evidence that the NSA, and thus the State, is not your friend. She shows former NSA Director Keith Alexander explicitly lying, before oath, to the American people. She shows that though there were calls for Snowden to come to the U.S. for ‘justice’ in the coercive courts, there was no legal chance of him winning. The law does not care if Snowden helped We The People, or if the State lied, or if no harm could be proved by Snowden’s actions.

Additionally, we get to see Pulitzer Prize winning anti-authoritarian journalist Glenn Greenwald’s verbal blitz, in English and in Portuguese, against the Panopticon NSA that is not only peeping whilst you are sleeping, but whilst Germany’s Chancellor Merkel, Brazil and the United Kingdom are sleeping as well. We get to hear George Polk Award winning anti-authoritarian investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill hint at his whistleblowing source from a different branch of the State than the NSA. We get to hear the testimony of Lavabit (now Dark Mail) founder Ladar Levinson tell us what he did when the State tried to shut him down for providing his crypto-email service for Snowden.

All that is appropriate for me to do is applaud Poitras, watch her other documentaries and tell you all to do the same, so that we may expose as many people as is humanly possible to the antisocial nature of the NSA, and the State writ large.